How African is Black America

The Black/African American population is one of the most unique groups in the United States. Almost all descendants of American slaves are mixed with some European and Native American blood.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University) published an article after consulting five genealogical DNA testing/research companies answering the question “How much African ancestry does the average African American have?” The results are as follows.

Company	Sub-Sahara African	European	Native American	Other
Ancestry.com	65%	29%	2%	4%
23andme.com	75%	22%	.06%	3%
Family Tree DNA.com	73%	23%	2%	2%
National Geographic’s Genographic Project	80%	19%	1%	0%
AfricanDNA	79%	2%	1%	2%

He also discovered “A whopping 35 percent of all African-American men descend from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child sometime in the slavery era, most probably from rape or coerced sexuality.”

African Americans in the deep south tend to have a higher percentage of African ancestry than other states with South Carolina having the highest at 83 percent. This should not be surprising due to the fact that more than half of all African captives landed in Charleston, SC. Also because of the many plantations in the deep south slave populations often outnumbered free White populations therefore a lower percentage of Black women would have been victim to rape (or at least less frequent). 

INTERACTIVE MAP
Percent of Sub-Sahara African ancestry of those who identify as African-American by State

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Source: The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 96 Supplemental Data
The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States Katarzyna Bryc, Eric Y. Durand, J. Michael Macpherson, David Reich, and Joanna L. Mountain

 

By City

Population researchers at Penn State University studied DNA samples from groups of African Americans throughout the US, West Africa, and Europe, to answer the question; How African are African Americans?

What they discovered contradicts some of the previous studies on the subject where it was thought that Blacks were about 30% white. They conclude that the average Black American is 17-18% white. But this is an average and it depends on the location. When geography is factored in we find that there is a wide range of mixed blood. The most African are those of the Gullah Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. This is also a logical conclusion based on the history of these Islands. Africans who were imported here were rice farmers who as slaves outnumbered whites by the thousands. Because of their large numbers and the absence of whites they were able to keep some of their African culture. This accounts for their “Caribbean” sounding accents and more prevalent West African features. The study concludes the Gullah are only 3-4% white. On the mainland in the South Carolina “Low Country” and near Charleston the percentages move up to about 12% which is still lower than average.